The millennial generation, those born between 1981 and 1999, are now estimated to number over 80 million in America. That’s more than even the baby boom generation! They’ve been called spoiled, narcissistic, and overly tech-dependent, but those generalizations come from the outliers that get our attention, not from real statistics. The events that shaped their lives include Katrina, 9-11, the housing bust, the longest war in American history, and millennials have developed their own ways of dealing with the uncertainties and insecurities of modern life.

“Almost two-thirds (64 percent) of millennials said they would rather make $40,000 a year at a job they love than $100,000 a year at a job they think is boring,” the Brookings Institution recently noted in a report by Morley Winograd and Michael Hais titled “How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street and Corporate America.”

The generation that gave us Occupy Wall Street has embraced its own modes of entrepreneurship, found across the broad spectrum of “creatives,” from stylists to techies, who reject the presumed security of the corporate job and riskily pursue their own ventures, even if it means working out of their parents’ basement. At the same time, record numbers of new college graduates are applying for jobs in the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps or Teach for America.